


In The Dark

by astolat



Series: Captain America works [16]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Prison Escape, The Raft Prison (Marvel), light - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: The Raft never got dark.





	In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting one story for each night of Hanukkah this year! 
> 
> Prompt from gwyn: _Sam and Steve, maybe at/after the rescue and arriving in Wakanda--Sam seeing light again after the prison, seeing the light in Wakanda._ This is what it turned into.

The Raft never got dark. They turned the lights out in the cells at night, or at least Sam assumed it was night, but it still wasn’t dark. The central chamber lit up instead, like they were all guests in a theater watching an empty stage, waiting for someone to walk out onto it, and the red eyes of the cameras shone, with blinking green LEDs letting them know someone was always watching. Even inside the cell, a line of gleaming blue ran all around the edges, bright enough to dye the light filtering through his eyelids when he tried to sleep. He split the day up with pushups and situps, with marathons of jogging in place with the mattress thrown on the floor so he wouldn’t beat the shit out of his own knees doing it on the concrete. The mattress could stand to be a hell of a lot softer anyway. He still couldn’t get a good night’s rest.

Nobody talked, not that you could hear from one cell to the next—conversation between prisoners wasn’t on the agenda—but it wasn’t quiet, either. The ocean was always moving on the other side of the wall, a big hollow echoing sound if he huddled up against it with the pillow wrapped over his head. He remembered being a kid in his aunt Linda’s house, taking the big old conch shell from Jamaica down off her shelf and listening to that same noise. His dad had said, “It’s just the sound of your heartbeat, son,” when he asked how the ocean got in there. Now he lay listening to the sound of his own heart beating, and it was the ocean instead.

That was the idea of the place. Sam knew what was supposed to happen, what did happen, when you put people in solitary, left them there day after day; no human voices, no human faces. Didn’t matter what kind of power you had. Only him and Barton had been trained for this shit. Wanda had been trained to move mountains, not to survive in a shoebox with nobody to talk to but the voices inside her own skull. He wished he could see them. His only view was the empty cells on the other side of the chamber, waiting. The one right across from him had a special rig, a full-body restraint system built into the wall, collar and cuffs for wrists and ankles and upper thighs and arms. He didn’t want to see that one filled.

He broke a piece off his bar of soap and scratched days into it, keeping it under his pillow. It was nineteen days in, his forehead pressed against the floor while he breathed after a plank, when the faint stutter interrupted the ocean sound. Sam shut his eyes in gratitude, and then he stood up and shook out his arms and legs, getting loose, getting ready. He waited. It wasn’t long when the shadows in the central chamber moved, and Steve came up to the cell door, emerging from the dark, smiling at him out of the side of his mouth.

“Hey, man,” Sam said. “How you been?”

“All right,” Steve said. He had a card, a bloody fingerprint smear over the surface, and a little rectangular box with a couple of LEDs. He swiped the card through the cell lock and pressed the device over it; lights started blinking. “You?”

Sam shrugged. “Yeah, you know. Same old, same old.” The door clicked and the glass slid down with a shushing noise. Steve slung the wing-pack off his shoulder and handed it to him. Sam had that down to thirty-six seconds, and he was pretty sure he beat his personal best that time; he was rigged out before Steve even finished getting Barton out.

“All right. Let’s go get Wanda,” Steve said. She was sitting in her cell huddled up small, her eyes blank. She didn’t move when they came to the door, only once it slid down, and she looked up at them dully.

“Hey, there,” Steve said quietly, crouching down next to her. “Can I get that off you?” He gestured at the collar around her neck.

She stared at him a moment longer, blinking, but then she said, “Yes.”

Steve nodded. “We’ve taken care of the defense systems and the personnel,” he said, calm and steady, even while he worked on the collar. “Nothing left to do but get Scott and head out.” The collar clanged to the ground, and he stood up and offered her a hand. She reached out and took it, and let him pull her to her feet.

“Why do I always get left for last?” Scott said, when they got to his cell. Sam gave him a good long _are you kidding me_ look and shook his head. “Seriously, always,” Scott went on complaining to Wanda, who looked back at him with her eyes still a little wide, but after a moment her mouth wobbled in something like a smile.

Sam didn’t relax until they were in the helicopter, and not quite then, at the beginning; he didn’t recognize the model, and he sure as hell knew every model the major players had. While the others got settled into seats, he stood in the back close by the side opening and watched the Raft sinking away beneath them. The helicopter’s running lights all switched off, and a _shimmer_ ran over its sides _,_ taking on a reflective gleam that made them blend into the night clouds.

In the back, one after another the others were already falling solidly asleep: the kind of exhaustion that came from twenty days of hardcore stress finally getting lifted off your back. Sam had done five long stints behind enemy lines; ten days, sixteen, twenty-two, thirty, thirty-one. He was going to put this one in the list, too—once he was sure it was over.

Steve came and stood next to him. “We good?” he asked quietly.

“You tell me,” Sam said. He jerked a thumb at the chopper. “You have to cut a deal for this?”

Steve shook his head. “No. We…got some help from a friend.”

“A friend, huh?” Sam said. “This friend from anyplace I know?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Wakanda.”

“Wakanda,” Sam said, flatly. Far as he knew, and he was pretty sure he knew as far as the Joint Chiefs did, Wakanda had a grand total of four used Black Hawks that they’d bought on the cheap back in the nineties. Nothing like _this_.

Steve gave him a wry grin. “Yeah. Get ready for a little culture shock.” He paused, then said, “Make that a _big_ culture shock. But yeah. We’re good.”

“Okay,” Sam said, simple, because that’s what it was. If Steve could say flat-out they were good, they were good. He stepped back from the open side, and Steve pushed a button and a piece of the hull extended down to close off the space, muting the sound of the chopping blades and the howl of the wind. Sam breathed out deep.

Steve took a step towards him, put a hand on his shoulder. “ _You_ good?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’ll be all right. Bucky?”

Steve pressed his mouth tight and looked aside. “He’s…he’s back under, for now. Cryofreeze. He thought…it was for the best.”

Sam put a hand of his own on Steve’s cheek, gave him a pat, squeezed his shoulder. He was pretty sure Bucky was right, but that wouldn’t have made it any easier on Steve, putting him down. “Hey, sounds pretty good to me, too. Take a little nap for ten years, let the statute of limitations run out. There’s a statute of limitations on busting up international treaties, right?”

“Yeah, I’m not sure about that,” Steve said, working up a smile.

“Damn,” Sam said. “Guess we won’t be making it to Sarah’s for the holidays anytime soon.”

“Guess not,” Steve said, softly, looking at him. For once, he didn’t say he was sorry, which Sam approved of. He’d had a year busting Steve out of that habit. “Think she’d ship some of that stuffing to Wakanda?”

“Yeah, you think so,” Sam said. “The way you go through that stuff, it’s gonna be college tuition money to ship a package that big.” But he saw Sarah and the kids and his mom around the table while he said it, and his voice cracked a little, with all he could do. Steve took another step in and Sam opened up for it and got his arms around him, Steve’s body warm and solid against his, and Steve buried his face against his shoulder even as Sam did the same thing, and they just held on, in the quiet, in the dark, together.

# End

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] In The Dark](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13107873) by [regonym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/regonym/pseuds/regonym)




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